GARY OLSON—Although I also lived in Minnesota and South Dakota, my formative years were spent in Fargo, North Dakota along the Red River of the North on the eastern border of the state. The city was named for William Fargo, an owner of the Wells-Fargo Express Company and one of the directors of the Union Pacific Railroad whose tracks ran through the center of town and held up traffic three times a day. When UP engineers and surveyors first arrived, they were accompanied by U.S. Army officers. This continuing symbiotic partnership between the capitalist state and big business was exemplified by Congress granting rail companies 10 million acres of free public land in Minnesota, amounting to 20 percent of the state’s land area. It was, of course, in the interest of railroad officials to lure immigrants to the region because it increased the value of their line. The construction of Fort Abercrombie in 1857, just thirty miles south of Fargo and the first fort in North Dakota, helped prompt immigrants to surge into the region through the “Gateway to the West” and stake their claims. Fort Abercrombie was followed by six more military bases across the state in the 1860s and early 1870s.
Default Editor Patrice de Bergeracpas
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Strategic Stupidity… Biden Torpedoes French & NATO Relations With Aussie Sub Deal to Target China
13 minutes readFINIAN CUNNINGHAM—French President Emmanuel Macron has ordered the recall of ambassadors from the U.S. and Australia in a sign of the intense anger in Paris over the newly unveiled alliance known as AUKUS – standing for Australia, United Kingdom and the United States. The return of French envoys from these allied nations has never happened before.
What’s at stake is a €56 billion contract to build a fleet of 12 submarines for Australia by France that was first signed in 2016. That deal has been scrapped and replaced by a contract with the U.S. and Britain to supply Australia with eight nuclear-powered submarines. The French subs that were on order were diesel-electric powered.
That’s a huge loss in financial revenue for France as well as a hammer blow to French naval jobs and ancillary industries. But what’s more damaging is the stealth and a palpable sense of betrayal. The French were evidently hoodwinked by the Americans, British and Australians over the whole backroom deal.
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STEPHEN COOPER—Like many countries in the world, Syria has legislation against cybercrime. The central plank of anti-cyber terrorism legislation is the Cybercrime Law 17/2012, updated in 2018. This law established the responsibility for monitoring cybercrimes in Syria and assigned it to the National Agency for Network Services (NANS). This responsibility is implemented by CERT Syria, which is the national Computer Emergency Response Team.
The 2018 amendment to the law required a cadre of judges in the intricacies of technology. This addressed a lack of comprehension of technical issues that previously made the judiciary incapable of properly adjudicating cybercrime cases.
The need for updated processes to combat cybercrime originates with a hacker team called the Syrian Electronic Army. This group is the main threat to internet security in Syria. However, their activities are sporadic, and the group has fallen dormant for long periods.
The Syrian Electronic Army has often been labeled by anti-Assad activists, writing from Western nations, as a branch of the Syrian government. However, no one has ever come up with any proof of a link.
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Sinophobia Meets Prison Labor in a Think Tank Down Under
14 minutes readPEPE ESCOBAR—The US federal report on prison labor actually states, unambiguously, that “all able-bodied sentenced prisoners” are required to work. The operative word is “required”.
UNICOR, which operates no less than 110 factories in 65 federal prisons, is blandly described as the trade name for the Federal Prison Industries (FPI) in the US, a “self-sustaining government corporation that sells market-priced services and quality goods made by inmates”. Including, of course, weapons for the industrial-military complex.
According to 2019 figures, the US government – which de facto operates the prison factories – funded ASPI with $1.37 million.
Unisystems, an IT firm that sells interphones for US prisons, also funded ASPI from 2005 to 2019. Inmate labor may be dirty cheap, but if they want to place a call to their lawyers or their family they need to shell out up to $24 for 15 minutes.